NOTICE: Theory and Method in Legal History

The following blog entry was posted recently on The Faculty Lounge blog:

"Law As ..." Theory and Method in Legal History

This morning's mail brought a very exciting volume, the September 2011 issue of the UC Irvine Law Review, which has a lengthy symposium on "Law As ..." Theory and Method in Legal History.  This reminds me of just how many different directions legal history scholarship is pointing.  I mean, this issue is more than 500 pages long!  There's a lot that ought to be said about this, but right now I'd like to crib a little from Catherine Fisk and Bob Gordon's introduction and say that they divided the articles into five categories of "law as" -- law as the language of social relations; law as consciousness; law as enhanced ritual and as spectacle; law as sovereignty; and law as economic/cultural activity.  

My interests run these days to how law serves as a gauge of culture and also as an important technology, as well as an instrument of power and governor of it (to a lesser extent).  And I'm also mightily interested in the ways that legal scholarship can be applied to immediate issues (what is increasingly called "applied legal history.")  I hope to write some more -- perhaps this summer when there's time! -- about the many directions legal historians are going.  I have the feeling this field is pointing out in so many directions.  I think you'll really enjoy the articles!  Here they are:

• Catherine L. Fisk and Robert W. Gordon, Foreword: “Law As . . .”: Theory and Method in Legal History
  
• Steven Wilf, Law/Text/Past
• Laura F. Edwards,The Peace: The Meaning and Production of Law in the Post-Revolutionary United States
• Kunal M. Parker, Law “In” and “As” History: The Common Law in the American Polity 1790‒1900 
• Roger Berkowitz, From Justice to Justification: An Alternative Genealogy of Positive Law
• Marianne Constable, Law as Claim to Justice: Legal History and Legal Speech Acts
• Christopher W. Schmidt, Conceptions of Law in the Civil Rights Movement
• Norman W. Spaulding, The Historical Consciousness of the Resistant Subject
• Barbara Young Welke, Owning Hazard, A Tragedy
• Peter Goodrich, Specters of Law: Why the History of the Legal Spectacle Has Not Been Written
• Shai J. Lavi, Enchanting a Disenchanted Law: On Jewish Ritual and Secular History in Nineteenth-Century Germany
• Assaf Likhovski, Chasing Ghosts: On Writing Cultural Histories of Tax Law
• John Fabian Witt, The Dismal History of the Laws of War
• Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: Territorial Expansion in the Antebellum Era 
• Mariana Valverde, “The Honour of the Crown is at Stake”: Aboriginal Land Claims Litigation and the Epistemology of Sovereignty
• Roy Kreitner, Money in the 1890s: The Circulation of Politics, Economics, and Law
• Ritu Birla, Law as Economy: Convention, Corporation, Currency
• Christopher Tomlins and John Comaroff, “Law As . . .”: Theory and Practice in Legal History